He used to do modeling and animation for the stuff in his ILM projects done on Macs working from home, like the warp drive shots in STAR TREK GENERATIONS and I think the shot looking out of the Phoenix up at the moon in FIRST CONTACT.

I think maybe the whole Rebel Mac unit arose out of LucasFolks realizing how much Knoll was able to get done himself with his home Mac. Pretty sure the work he did adding to DEEP SPACE NINE's 4th season title sequence -- basically busying up the exterior of the stations with spacesuited figures and workbees and spaceships -- was all done on Macs, as was the solar sailer he did for DS9 in a season 3 episode.

Is the thought that he did the wraparound 180 shot that replaced the first two model shots in the attack the deathstar scene? Cuz that is a huge fail for me, it looks seriously BABYLON 5. What I really like about his TREK work is that the shadows are really crispy black.

It's funny, one of the strongest memories I have of ILM is being in a room -- this must have been when I was there for 3 days doing 43 interviews about PHANTOM MENACE -- where they had two really huge photo blowups, each about 2 ft tall by 5 ft long as I recall them -- one was the Enterprise-B in dock from GENERATIONS, and the other was that CG X- and Y-wing fleet from STAR WARS A DIGITAL HOPE. The Ent shot looked at least as good as it did in the theater, and the fleet shot still had that cartoony feel, though not as pronounced as the in-motion shot.

I think if I did my own cut of SW, I know I'd keep the original 2-cut model version of that shot, but cut it a bit sooner, so you don't have all that engine light wobble. I consider the original SW to be a very well edited and sound mixed movie, but I'd still do some tweaks.

Someplace I've got a list of my tweaks for Kevin's version of STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. That's got a LOT more work involved, like plugging in Dykstra's explosion from the first trailer, cutting some of the guy fleeing Ep9, finding Yuricich's original Vulcan painting, and about 130 other things, only two of which were done for the so-called director's cut.

It's funny, one of the strongest memories I have of ILM is being in a room -- this must have been when I was there for 3 days doing 43 interviews about PHANTOM MENACE -- where they had two really huge photo blowups, each about 2 ft tall by 5 ft long as I recall them -- one was the Enterprise-B in dock from GENERATIONS, and the other was that CG X- and Y-wing fleet from STAR WARS A DIGITAL HOPE. The Ent shot looked at least as good as it did in the theater, and the fleet shot still had that cartoony feel, though not as pronounced as the in-motion shot.

There is a gauzy look to those SE shots that don't match the crispness or relative sharpness of the original shots.